Month: July 2017

I’m pleased to announce that we released our first official beta version of ListenBrainz yesterday! As you may know, ListenBrainz is our project to collect, preserve and make available, user listening data similar to what Last.fm has been doing, but with open data.

In 2015 a small group of hackers gathered in London to hack on the first version of ListenBrainz alpha. We threw together a pile of new technologies and released the first version of ListenBrainz at the end of the weekend. In the end, we didn’t really like the new technologies (Cassandra, Kakfa) as both ended giving us a lot of problems that never seemed to end.

In 2016 we embarked on a journey to pick new technologies that we liked better and ended up setting on InfluxDB and RabbitMQ as backbones to our data ingestion pipeline. These tools were a good match for us, since we were already using them in production! Sadly, MetaBrainz’ move to our new hosting provider ended up sucking up any available time we had to devote to the projects, so progress was made in fits and starts.

Earlier this year Param Singh expressed interest to help with the project in hopes of joining us for a Google Summer of Code project. He started submitting a never ending stream of pull requests; slowly the project started moving forwards. Together we brought the codebase up to our current standards and integrated it into the workflow that we use for all of the MetaBrainz projects.

We proceeded to prepare the next version to be released at MetaBrainz’s new hosting facility and started a never ending series of tests. We kept pounding on the data ingestion pipeline, trying to find all of the relevant bugs and ways in which the data flow could get snagged. Finally the number of reported bugs relating to data ingestion dropped to zero and we managed to import 10M listens (a listen is a record of one song being played)!

That was our cue for promoting our pre-beta test to a full beta and unleashing it onto our production servers at our new hosting facility. Today we cleaned up the last bits of the release and we are ready for business!

What does this new release bring for you, the end users? Sadly, only a few new things, since most of the work has gone into building a stable and scalable system. We do have a few new things in this release:

Incremental imports from Last.fm — now you don’t have to do a full import any time you wish to import your latest listens from Last.fm. The importer knows when you last did and import and will work accordingly.

Last.fm compatible submission interface — with some system configuration changes you can submit your listens directly to ListenBrainz from any application with Last.fm support. (more info here)

Last.fm file import — if you have an old skool Last.fm zip file with your listening history backed up, you can now import it.

User data export — you can now download your own listens straight from the site, no waiting required.

Adaptive rate limiting on the API — our server now uses a modern rate limiting system. For details, see our API docs.

The good news is that Param is now working on his Summer of Code project that will add a lot of graphs and other critical elements for making use of this new data set. We hope to release new features on an ongoing basis from here on out.

Most importantly, we want to publicly state that ListenBrainz is now ready for business! We don’t plan to reset the database from here on out — this is the real deal and we plan to safeguard and make this database available as soon as we can. If you have hesitated with sending your listen histories to ListenBrainz in the past, you should now feel free to send your listen information to us! If you are an author of a music player, we ask that you consider adding support for ListenBrainz in your player!

In a follow-up blog post I am going to write about how to start using ListenBrainz now — at the very least use it to back-up your Last.fm listening history!

It’s hard to stress how much MusicBrainz depends on the community behind it. In 2016 alone 20.989 editors made a total of 5.935.653 edits at a continuously increasing rate.

But while MusicBrainz does collect data on a lot of different entities, its users are not one of them, and the privacy policy is pretty lean.
Unfortunately this does make it fairly difficult to find out who you are, how you use MB and why you do it.

Seeing as this kind of information is fairly important for the upcoming project of improving our user experience, I volunteered to create a survey to allow you to tell us how you use MB, what you like about it and what you don’t like quite as much.

So without further ado, click on the banner to get to the survey: (It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes of your time.)

Now if you’re still reading this blog post, that hopefully means you’ve already completed the survey! I’d like to thank Quesito who joined this project earlier this year and has been a great deal of help, our former GCI student Caroline Gschwend who helped with the UX part of the survey, CatQuest who has been around to give great feedback since the first draft and of course also all the other people who helped bring this survey to the point of release.

If you’ve got any feedback on or questions about the survey itself, please reply to the Discourse forum topic.